The expenses for "Obamacare" are a peanuts compared to the excessive military spending or running over a dozen spy agencies that do not talk to each other and violate the constitution on a regular basis.

Welcome to constitutional representative democracy, which is a messy, dirty and often highly inefficient business. While it may be great to dream that government could run like a private sector business such as Amazon, you should remember most corporations are closer to dictatorships. Is that what you truly want our government to be?

Come on IT is small change compared to the possible $2 TRILLION hit to our economy that Obamacare will be over just the next eight years. Shutting down the government is mere political theater. It won't last longer than around 7 to 10 days tops. Note that the stock market actually went UP after the shutdown. Can the budgeting process be made better? Doubtful, as long as members of congress use it to reinforce their own power.

There seems to be a misunderstanding that shutting down the government saves money. People don't realize that, even if you discount the hit to the economy, it costs hard dollars to shut down and reopen services, as Charlie says.

Stopping IT services to conform to a government shutdown, a difficult task. Starting IT services to recover from a government shutdown, an even more difficult task. This is a waste of skills, time and money. It halts the momentum behind development projects and risks the loss of data that falls out of synch with normal updates, People who don't understand IT are playing a game of chicken with the federal budget..

The big idea that needs to be embraced is getting agencies to stop building stuff,that requires big cap ex budgets, etc, and to start consuming services. That's easier said than done. If IT services move to operating budgets, they're actually at greater risk of being cut. Then you've got all the "sunk costs" in existing legacy systems, that no one wants to walk away from. A lot of these 3 year projects are more like big remodeling projects, Finally you've got a lot of employees -- and contractors -- (read "jobs") spread out across lots of Congressional home districts that are also at stake. If we can get govt. to really move to an IT services consumption model -- which is happening, by the way, as agencies move to the cloud -- that would speed up development cycles and get new technologies at work. Where to start? Unfortunately: It requires changes in Congress.

Thanks for this frank assessment. Three years is obviously too long to get through a budget process for one IT project. Imagine what Jeff Bezos would do with this process. How much would he shorten it? Amazon is hiring 70,000 seasonal employees now and will hire a percentage of them fulltime after the season. Could government learn from that model?

Fixing partisan gridlock seems unlikely, near term. Isn't there some way to make the budgeting process itself less rigid? It sounds like part of the problem is that priorities and technology choices that tend to drift out of date are specified in the budget documents themselves. Or am I misunderstanding?

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.